Factory wire size????

[airnudie]

Hey there, I just bought a 07 24ve a few weeks back and I was wondering what size power wire you folks have for the factory installed kicker 700.5 amp?

I have a dealer installed tower / speakers that they paralleled with the front speakers. I bought a zx200.2 so I could seperate the tower from the cabin. Upon looking into installing it I discovered the factory power wire / ground is only 8 ga. I used to play around with car audio back in my younger days and it suprised me to see that small of wire for a 400+ watt rms amp. I guess I will pull new wire when I install the new amp. Just wondering what you guys have for wire size????
Thanks

[CP3]

I have 4 runnning to a distribution block and then 8 to each 1600w amp

[spharis]

Wire size is a result of length and power. You need to know those before you know if the wire is big enough.

[airnudie]

Well, from what I come up with using about 15 feet, 13 volts and about 400 watts, I get a tad over 30 amps. At that lenth it seems like 8ga is a bit small.
I suppose the output of the amp could be padded a bit???

Just seems to me the factory would want to over size for safety. BTW the fuse is a 60 amp. At capacity which do you think would melt first????

Thanks

[spharis]

At that distance 8AWG is fine for up to 500 Watts. The recommended fusing on it is probably about 60-70A.

[airnudie]

Cool, thanks for the input. I will go to 4ga when I install the second amp.....

[Ks]

I just Spoke to Scott @ Samson about what amp he suggests for his quad 720 set up.

200 watts per channels with atleast 4 gauge wire and he really likes 2 gauge when the customer will allow him.

[philwsailz]

Couple of things to think about

* In a boat there is no ground plane, so you need to look at total length of wire for power and ground, as we wire ground all the way to the battery in boats.

* Kicker 700.5 uses #4 AWG wire input sizing. It makes sense to use the size the amp uses. Glad to read you decided to do so.

* The amp is fused at 90 amps; you will be fine with over-current protection, (i.e. fuse or manual reset breaker) at 100 amps; a little over is okay, but do not exceed 1.5 times the amp current draw.

* Dual battery isolators have a slight problem with them, in that the charging voltage is reduced by .7 volts when the motor is running. Small power wire will have a small voltage drop of its own, so use as large a wire as possible to minimize the cumulative effect. The amp will pulse on and off with bass hits when the battery voltage gets to around 10.5...

[spharis]

Yes <thumbsup> wire rating for length takes into account the total circuit length....pos and neg.